Front matter (continued 3)

I would often sit with them in dead silence around the fire, five or six men dressed in rough clothing, their powerful frames relaxed over a bottle of beer or a glass of tea, each lost in his own thoughts. But this silence wasn’t heavy—it was an alive silence. And when someone spoke, it was not to engage in nonsense. Never have I heard commonness or cheapness enter into their conversation. When they talked, what they said had meaning. It told something. A cow was sick. An axle from a car or a truck or a tractor broke. The nets split in two. Soon the herring season will be upon us. What partnerships will be entered into this year? The weather is too dry or too rainy. Someone is building a shed or a house. Someone cut his thigh and needed thirty stitches. Someone needs help in bringing in his hay.

In this world that is entirely elemental, each man wrestles with the direct necessities of living. This is not conducive to small talk, to worrying about losing a pound or gaining a pound or figuring out where to spend one’s free time. When there is time for relaxation, the talk usually turns to old times, fables of the world as it “used to be”—the giant fish once caught: rainbows weighing fifty pounds, browns weighing seventy, steelheads by the 121droves. And behind all of this lies the constant awareness that Lake Superior is an ocean, never to be trifled with, never taken for granted.

The women are strongly built and beautiful, with low, almost sing-songsing-song voices. Their “yes” is a “yah” so sweetly inflected that you want immediately to imitate it, and can’t. Their simple homes are handsomely furnished through their own labors. When I dropped in, unexpected, I was certain to receive a quiet, sincere greeting that put me at ease and assured me I was no intruder. There would be a glass of tea or coffee and a thick slice of home-made bread spread with butter and a variety of jams. Nearly everything in the household was made by hand, all the clothing, even the shoes. And just about everything outside the household, too, including the fine boats.

Even today it is possible to live like a king at Bark Point on fifteen hundred dollars a year—under one condition: one must learn to endure loneliness and one must be capable of doing things for himself.

The people around Bark Point have radios and television sets, automobiles and tractors and other machines. But the people come first, the machines second. Bark Point people do not waste time questioning existence. They laugh and eat and sleep without resorting to pills. They have learned to renounce and to accept, but there is no room in their lives for resignation and pessimism. However, they do suspect that the world outside is mostly populated by madmen, or, as one of my neighbors said to me, “What do you call dogs that foam at the mouth?”

122When I go to Bark Point, it occurs to me that what the world needs is more private clubs, more private estates and exclusive residential areas, more private centers of entertainment, anything that will isolate the crass from the mainstream of life and let them feed upon themselves. Anything that will keep them away from the people of Bark Point.

The master builder of Bark Point is a seventy-seven year old man named Matt Leppalla. When one asks Matt a question, his invariable reply is, “I’ll look of it.” “Look of it” means that he will measure the problem, work it in his mind, and provide the answer. He lives in a house built entirely by his own hands. If he needs a tool for a job and no such tool exists, he invents it. His energy and capacity for sustained work is amazing for a man of any age. He has built almost everything we possess at Bark Point.

A few summers ago, we decided to build a dock to protect our beach and secure our boat against the fierce Northeaster. So Matt and I took the boat and set out to look for logs washed up on the shores of Bark Bay. There was no hesitation on Matt’s part as we hurried from log to log. “Good,” he would say, “this is cedar. No good, this is poplar. This is good. This is Norway pine. No good, this is rotten in the middle.” And so from log to log, Matt in the lead with the canthook on his back and with me following behind, trying as hard as I could to keep up.

When the selection had been made, Matt offered to teach me how to tie the logs so we could tow them over the lake to our shore. It looked easy, but it required an 123almost occult knowledge of weights and forces to determine exactly the right place to tie the rope so the log would not slip and jam the motor or slam against the side of the boat. Everything there is to be known about leverage Matt knows, including the most subtle use of ropes and pulleys for least expense to the human back.

The building of the crib for our dock was one of the wonders of the world, executed with the quickness and sureness of a man who knows and loves what he is doing. Or if any difficulty arose with material too stubborn to bend to his thinking, I could virtually see him recast his thought to fit the situation.

Matt is slight of build and the eyes behind his spectacles are sparkling blue. When he first got the glasses, they were not fitted to his satisfaction, so he improved them by grinding the lenses himself. He reminds me in many ways of my own father, who had a bit of Matt’s genius and versatility. When I see Matt work, I seem to see my father again ... building, planning, dreaming, trying to make something out of nothing.

Ervin owns the general store in Herbster. Every week he drives his truck to Duluth for supplies, carrying with him a frayed, pocket-sized notebook in which he has written down everything people have asked for. Once I had a chance to look through this notebook which Ervin treasures with his life. Only Ervin could possibly know what was written in it.

Ervin’s capacity for eating is marvelous to behold. 124While the children stare at him in petrified wonder, he will put together a sandwich of cheese, sausage, fish, butter, meat balls, even strips of raw meat. His capacity for work is equally limitless. He is a powerful man and can wrestle with bags of cement all day long. But he cannot catch fish! At least that is his story and his claim to fame in the area: never to have caught a fish that amounted to anything. I don’t believe a word of it.

Ervin fights many of the same business battles I have fought with no capital and extended credit. He worries about it, but the odds are a challenge to him. You cannot long endure at Bark Point unless you are capable of meeting challenges.

In addition to his appalling eating habits, Ervin chews tobacco and is a horrifying master of the art. He showed our boys the full range of techniques employed for spitting out of a fast-moving truck, and they thought it was wonderful. But he has also taught them all about the bears and deer and foxes and wolves and other wild life that abound in our forest. He helped me with the plans for our house, with the boat, with the art of reading a compass, and with the geography of the myriad lakes and streams hidden throughout the area. Ervin knows everything and says very little. He is easy to be with, and a solid friendship based upon mutual respect has grown between us.

When spring begins to come, something that has been kept buried in our winter hearts can no longer be suppressed. The children start saying, “We’ll be leaving for Bark Point soon, won’t we?” One spring day when the 125children were on vacation from school, I packed the boys into the car and we set out for an early visit to our spiritual home. The day of our arrival was clear and beautiful. The ice had gone out of the Bay and clumps of snow remained only here and there. New grass was coming up from the steaming earth. There were pink-flecked clouds in the sky and a glorious smell everywhere that filled us both with peace and exhilaration.

But early the next morning it began to snow, coming down so thick and fast it was a sight to behold. My exclusively summer experience of the North Country warned me of nothing. We delighted in the snowy wonderland seen from the snugness of the house, and bundled up in heavy clothes and boots to go out and revel in it.

It snowed all through the night. On the following morning, it seemed to be coming on stronger than ever. I phoned Ervin—fortunately the telephone lines were still working. He thought the snow might stop by evening.

“How are your supplies?” he said.

“Still o.k.,” I said.

“What about fuel?”

“Waino gave me a supply of wood and brickettes for the stove yesterday.”

“Have you got enough?”

“Yes—so far.”

“Good. As soon as it stops, I’ll be up with the truck.”

But the snow did not stop. The following day it lay ten feet high and was still coming.

Ervin called again. “The roads are closed,” he said. “I can’t get to you. Can you hold out?”

126“Yes,” I said, “but I’m starting to cut up the furniture for the stove and I’m worried about the children.”

“I’ll come up the minute I can get there,” he said, “but I can’t do nothing about it yet.”

It snowed for three days and three nights without a letup. I tried to keep awake, dozing in a chair, never daring to let the fire go out. We had long since run out of fuel oil, but luckily we had the wood-burning cook stove. I broke up two tables, all the chairs, and was ruefully contemplating the wooden dresser. The phone had gone dead and we were completely isolated.

It was night, the snow was up to the windows and it was still coming on—a dark world shot with white flecks dancing and swirling. The whole thing seemed completely impossible. But it was happening and there was nothing to do but wait it out.

We had no milk, but there was water and a small supply of tea and coffee. There was flour, too, and we made bread ... bread without yeast or salt. It tasted terrible, but we ate it and laughed about it. I read or played cribbage with the boys. They played with their fishing reels, oiled them, took them apart, put them back together, took them apart again. We waited.

The morning the snow stopped we were greeted by bright sunlight hot on the window panes. Everyone jumped up and down and yelled, “Yay!”

But how to get out of the house? We were snowed in completely.

About noon, Ervin called. The lines were fixed and Bill Lloma was working like crazy with his tractor opening 127the Bark Bay Road. Everyone had been alerted to our plight and help would be on the way.

Several more hours passed. We were without food or fuel, and I still hated the idea of chopping up that dresser. Then all at once our savior was in sight: Ervin in his truck, way down the main road and still unable to get anywhere near our driveway.

There was no restraining the children in their excitement. The yelling and shouting was enough to waken the dead. I found myself laughing and yelling, too, and waving madly to Ervin. We were all behaving as though we were going to a picnic instead of getting out of a frightful jam.

Finally Bill came lumbering up the road with his snow plow and in fifteen minutes cut a huge pathway to the house. We came out and danced around Ervin’s truck as it backed slowly into the driveway.

“Where’s your car?” Ervin asked.

We had to look around—it was completely buried. I had even forgotten I had it. Working together, we cleared the snow away. I tried starting the motor, but nothing happened. Ervin attached a chain to the car and pulled it up the road. This time the motor turned over, but so suddenly (and my reflexes were so slow) that, before I knew it, the car had swerved off the wet road into a ditch. I was fit to be tied.

Getting the car onto the road from the muddy embankment took an hour. Finally it was done and all was well. We retired to the house and made a feast of the supplies Ervin had brought, eating as though we were never 128likely to see food again, building Ervin-style sandwiches and consuming them with Ervin gusto. Occasionally Ervin would cast around and say something droll about the absence of chairs and having to sit on the edge of a dresser. Everything seemed hilariously funny. It was the best party I ever had.

When June arrives, we organize our caravan and steal away in the early hours of the morning: six children, the maid, two cats, three birds, two Golden Retrievers, Hope and I and all the luggage, packed into a station wagon. Gypsies have to get out of town while the city sleeps.

At first our spirits are high. The babies, Amy and Lisa, play or sit quietly. Then restlessness sets in. David and Jonathan become fidgety. David playfully slaps Jonathan, and the battle begins. I lose my temper and bawl at both of them. Then Lisa gets tired and tries to sleep on Hope and Amy and me in the front seat. Now Susan wants some water, and David calls out from the back of the wagon, “I’m sick.” Amy now wants to sleep, too, so in the front seat we have: me at the wheel, Lisa, Amy, Hope, and Big Joe in Hope’s arms. In the center of the car are Susan, the maid, and the two dogs; in the back, David and Jonathan, the birds and the cats, and everything that we couldn’t tie on top in the luggage carrier.

But we are off! And amid confusion and frayed nerves—and much laughter, also—we share a secret joy, a gypsy joy, and the knowledge that our spiritual refuge lies ahead and so many useless cares and dehumanizing pressures drop farther and farther behind us.

129Bill Roman, who has made an art of living life simply, worries about the inroads of those who seem determined to despoil what remains of this crude but civilized outpost, where I have learned so much about what is truly human. He is concerned about the hunters who come up from the big cities to slaughter deer and leave them rotting in the fields. They are only on hand a short while, with their shiny boots and gaudy jackets and their pockets full of money, but they create nothing but noise and havoc. When they finally leave, Bark Point repairs the damage, but each year it is a little worse. In a few more years, Bill fears, Bark Point could become a resort town like Mercer or Eagle River. If it does, he says, he’ll move to Canada.

Personally, I don’t think we can afford to surrender any more outposts—in our culture and in the remnants of community living that still center around values that make for human dignity. I still say: Let the despoilers feed upon one another. Encourage their self-segregation, away from the mainstream of life. Even give them junk books, if that is all their feeble moments of introspection can bear. But never, never surrender.

130

10 Hope and I

It was only after I had been on television and begun receiving letters from viewers that I realized how seriously interested people are in the personal lives of others. Curiosity about one’s immediate neighbors is not intense in a large city. Often you do not see enough of them to get curious. You see more and know more of public figures than of the person in the next apartment. Curiosity about people in public life can become ridiculous when exploited by press agents. But wanting to know more about someone whom you have become interested in as a public personality is as sincere and natural as the wish to know more about the lives of those with whom you have become acquainted in a more personal way.

Still, it was a surprise to me when people wrote to ask who and what I was, where and how I lived, and all about my wife and children. A surprise, but not an affront, for when I receive such letters, I have exactly the same curiosity about those who write them. I really would like to know all about them.

131My personal life began on the West Side of Chicago. WeWe lived at 1639 South Central Park Avenue, a neighborhood of houses and trees and good back yards. In our back yard we even had a duck pond with a duck in it, not to mention the flowers and the grass that my father tended so lovingly. My father was a tool and die maker. He could speak and read several languages with ease, had a marvelous sense of humor, and revered greatness. He believed in two things: love and work. He mistrusted those who did not.

Although my father died several years ago, my mother is alive, and now in her late eighties. In the sixty-five years of her life in this country, she has seldom left the kitchen, yet she knows more about the human heart, about human weakness and suffering, and about human caring than I shall ever know. She is gentle and kind, and her adage to me since childhood has been: Keep out of mischief—as sound a bit of wisdom concerning conduct as you are likely to find anywhere, not excluding Spinoza.

It was an alive neighborhood, populated by people of mixed origin, although predominantly Jewish. There was plenty of activity on our street: kids practicing on horns, playing fiddles, playing games—mostly baseball and peg and stick. Peg and stick may require a bit of explanation for the present younger generation. To start the game, it is necessary to steal a broom. This is always done with the confident expectation that this article is something your mother will never miss. Cut off the handle, so you have a stick about twenty-two inches long. Also cut a seven inch peg. Now go out in the street and with your penknife make a hole in the asphalt. In summer 132the pitch is tacky, so this is no problem. Stand by the hole and, using the stick as a bat, knock the peg down the street. Then mark the hole by putting the stick in it. Your opponent must now take the peg, wherever it lies, and toss it toward the stick. The place it falls is marked, and, of course, as the turns go around, whoever gets the peg closest to the hole wins the point.

But most of all there was an awful lot of talking—on the streets, on the corner by the delicatessen, and among people sitting on their front porches. Talk ... and lots of laughter. And there were great good times at home, especially in the evenings when my father told stories of his sojourn in Europe, or his adventures in America, or his day-to-day experiences at work.

I was the youngest child in a family of six children, and my life revolved around such matters as dogs, reading, and poetry. I had my own dog, but I also caught every stray dog in the neighborhood, washed and defleaed it, and anointed it with cologne (causing a great rumpus when discovered by one of my sisters from whom the cheap scent had been appropriated). My poetical labors were not properly appreciated by my sisters, either, who would collapse into gales of laughter when I interrupted their bathroom sessions of beauty culture to read them my latest verses.

My father built me a study in the basement and I set up a program of studies for myself: chemistry one week, physics the next, then mathematics, philosophy, etc. It was a wonderful thing until I blew the place up in the course of my chemical experiments. This ended my career in the physical sciences.

133One summer I painted our house—a complete exterior paint job utilizing only a one and one-half inch brush. It took me from June to September, and finally the neighbors were complaining to my mother about the way she was working me. They didn’t know that I was in no hurry to finish the job. It was not only a labor of love so far as the painting went, but I was spending my time up there in a glory of memorizing poetry and delivering noble dissertations.

I was seldom seen without a book, and nobody regarded this as particularly odd, for the sight of young people reading on the streets, on their porches, on a favorite bench in Douglas Park was common. It is not common today. The only wonder is that I never toppled off a curb or got killed crossing a street—one read as he walked and paid little attention to the hazards of city living.

Furthermore, nobody told us, in school or elsewhere, what a child between the ages of nine and twelve should be reading and what he should read from twelve to fourteen, etc. We read everything that took our fancy, whether we understood it or not, from Nick Carter to Kant and Penrod and Sam to Joyce. And when we became infatuated with some writer, we stopped barely short of total impersonation. When I read that Shelley had carried crumbs in his pocket, I started to do likewise and practically lived on breadcrumbs for days.

All of us who grew up in the Depression years on the West Side remember vividly the men out of work and the soup kitchens going on Ogden Avenue; houses and apartments becoming crowded as married sons and daughters 134moved in with their families. People stayed home and listened to the radio: Wayne King playing sweet music from the Aragon Ballroom and Eddie Cantor singing that potatoes are cheaper, so now’s the time to fall in love.

I went to school with the heels worn off my shoes and sat in class with my overcoat on because there were two holes in the seat of my pants. When the teacher asked a question, I would reply with a sermon. I spent my days fuming ... I hadn’t found myself. One day I encountered the works of Schopenhauer and felt I had at last arrived at an idea of life on a highly negative plane. A short time later I presented my whole schema to a friend, who blew it up completely.

My formal education was quite diverse. I never went to school without working to foot the bill and in the course of time did about everything, it seems, except selling shoes. I was an usher at the Chicago Theatre (a vast, gaudy temple of entertainment then featuring elaborate stage shows as well as the latest movies), where I eventually became Chief of Service. I was an errand boy and a newspaper boy (selling papers on the corner of Wabash and Van Buren for a dollar a night, seven o’clock to midnight). I worked in a grocery store, a hardware store, a department store. I was a bus boy and a dishwasher. I sold men’s clothing, worked at the University of Chicago, and wrote squibs for a neighborhood newspaper. I went to Crane Junior College, to the old Lewis Institute, and attended graduate courses at the University of Chicago. And during all this, I took courses in every field that captured my imagination or provoked my curiosity: neurology, 135philosophy, psychology, literature, sociology, anthropology, languages (German, especially) ... everything.

One day, while I was still an undergraduate, a professor whose heart I had captured through my ability to recite from memory the Ode to the West Wind, took me aside and assured me that if I were to be a teacher of literature, which he suspected would be my goal in life, a faculty position in a college or university English department was not likely to come easily to a man named Brodsky. Frankly, it was his suggestion that Stuart Brodsky find another last name—at least if he wanted to become an English teacher. “What name?” I said. “Any other name that seems to fit,” he replied.

I took the suggestion up with my sisters. We thought Brent might do nicely. Then I asked my father for his opinion. He told me that no matter what I did with my name, I would still be his son and be loved no less. It was settled. At the age of nineteen, my name was legally changed to Brent.

Brent or Brodsky, I taught incipient teachers at the Chicago Teachers College. Then I lectured on Literary Ideas at the University of Chicago’s downtown division. The world took a nasty turn and I left teaching to enter the Armed Forces. I spent twenty-seven months in the army, becoming a Master Sergeant in charge of military correspondence under Colonel Jack Van Meter. When a commission was offered me, I asked for OCS training and got it. But toward graduation time, the prospect of signing up for two more years as a commissioned officer was too much and I rejected it. The war was over. I was 136on my way to the vagaries of civil life and to becoming a bookseller.

The Seven Stairs was born, grew, died. I found myself a widower, endeavoring to maintain my sanity and my household and fighting for commercial survival on Michigan Avenue.

One day in 1956 a tall, pretty redhead named Daphne Hersey grew tired of her job in one of the dress shops on Michigan Avenue and came to work for me. She was a Junior League girl, but a lot else beside. Before I knew it, we had three Junior Leaguers working in the shop, and I was wondering whether the shop was going to be swept away in an aura of sophistication that was incomprehensible to me. But my respect for Daphne and her integrity remained limitless. And I had no notion of the improbable consequences in the offing.

Nothing is easier than saying hello. The day Hope walked in to chat with Daphne, the world seemed simple. She and Daphne had attended Westover together. They had grown up in the same milieu. Daphne introduced Hope to me. I was three years a widower, absorbed in my problems of family and business. Hope was a young girl struggling to stay really alive, teaching at North Shore Country Day School, living in the token independence of a Near North Side apartment shared with another girl. We chatted for a moment or two about books, and I sold her a copy of a more than respectable best-selling novel, By Love Possessed.

Summer was coming. I was intent upon taking my children up to Bark Point. I would spend a week or ten 137days with them, leave them there with the maid and return for two weeks in the city. Then back again to the Lake. This was my summer routine. But Daphne wanted a vacation, too, and we were short of help. While we were discussing this dilemma, in walked Hope. Daphne asked her what she was doing during her vacation from kindergarten teaching. Nothing. And would she like to work here for three weeks? Hope accepted. The next day I left for the Lake. When I returned, Daphne would leave, and by that time Hope would have learned her way around. Together with our other girl in the shop, we could hold the fort until Daphne came back. It was as simple as that.

When, in due time, I returned, Daphne left and Hope and I were thrown pretty much together. I loved working with her, and she seemed thrilled with the bookstore. It was a courtship almost unaware, then a falling in love with all our might. And the probability of a good outcome seemed almost negligible.

There is such a thing as “society.” It is not a clique or gilded salon of arts and letters such as a Lionel Blitzsten might assemble, but an ingrown family, far more tribal than what is left of Judaism. In point of fact, the old West Side no longer exists—its children, our family among them, are scattered to the winds. But the North Shore, beleaguered perhaps, is still an outpost of the fair families of early entrepreneurs, a progeny of much grace anchored to indescribable taboos.

The plain fact is, it calls for an act of consummate heroism to withstand real hostility from one’s family. It 138is not only a matter of the ties of love. It is a matter of who you are, finding and preserving this “who” ... and you may lose it utterly if you deny your family, just as you may lose it also by failing to break the bonds of childhood.

Even when people try to be understanding and decent, they can be tripped by their vocabulary. In the protective and highly specialized environment in which Hope was raised, anti-Semitism was as much a matter of vocabulary as of practical experience. Even the mild jibes of pet names often involved reference to purported Jewish traits. This atmosphere is so total that those who breathe it scarcely think about it.

This beautiful and vital girl with whom my heart had become so deeply involved, brilliant and well-educated, loved and admired by family and friends, could not possibly make the break that our relationship would call for without the most terrible kind of struggle. Hope’s parents were dead, but she had an aunt and uncle and a sister and brother. Their reaction to my impending descent upon their world was one of violent shock and bitter protest.

Hope’s relatives were vitally concerned about what she was getting herself into. As if I wasn’t! I think if they had pointed out to her that, in addition to being Jewish, I had three small children, that there was an age difference involved, and that she herself might be running away from some nameless fear, they would have stood a better chance of prevailing. But the social impossibility of the case seemed to be the overwhelming obstacle.

If it were all really a dreadful error, I could only pray 139that Hope might be convinced of it. I was afraid of marriage. I couldn’t afford a love that was not meant to be. I had to think not only of Hope and me, but of the children—they couldn’t be subjected to another tragedy. There mustn’t be a mistake.

To me, it was a terrible thing to have to remain passive, to ask Hope to shoulder the whole burden of our relationship. We sought out a psychoanalyst to help us—one I had never met socially or in a business way (not easy; I knew nearly all of them on a first name basis) and who, if at all possible, was not Jewish. I did find such a man and Hope arranged to see him. He gave her the facts about the risks involved in marrying me. He also gave assurance that she was neither neurotic nor in need of analysis. And that threw the whole thing right back to Hope again.

Hope left the city to hold counsel with herself. I stayed and did likewise, on the crossroads of my own experience. We had a hard time of it ... and love won through, feeding, obviously, on struggle, obstacles, impossibilities, and growing all the better for it.

I am sure God was beside me when I married Hope. Since then, everything I do seems right and good. We do everything together ... my life is empty when she is gone even for a few days. Hope’s brother and sister have learned that the “impossible” thing, social acceptance, does not interest me, but that there are other areas of living equally important. We are friends.

Life with love is not without struggle. The struggle is continuous, but so is our love for each other and our family. 140With the addition of Amy Rebecca, Lisa Jane, and Joseph Peter, the Brent children now number six. It gives us much quiet amusement to hear parents complaining about the difficulties of raising two or three. Hope is responsible for naming Joseph Peter, our youngest. “He looks so much like you and your family,” she said, “I think it would be very wrong if we didn’t name him after your father.” And so we did.

141

11 My Affair with the Monster

Among the things I have never planned to be, a television performer ranks pretty high on the list.

I have already mentioned that the unlikely person who initiated my relationship with the new Monster of the Age was the wise and kindly Ben Kartman. Ben by this time had left Coronet Magazine and was free lancing in editorial and public relations work. I had not seen him for some months when he came into the shop with a public relations man named Max Cooper. Except for having heard of instances in which they purportedly exercised a dangerous power over gossip columnists, I knew nothing about PR boys. I simply regarded them as suspect. Consequently I should probably have taken a dim view of the idea they came in to talk with me about—auditioning for a television program—even if I hadn’t been opposed on principle to television.

At the time, it seemed to me that television was the most vicious technological influence to which humanity 142had been subjected since the automobile’s destruction of the art of courtship as well as the meaning of the home. The novelty of TV had not yet worn off, and it was still a shock to walk into a living room and see a whole family sitting before this menacing toy, silent and in semi-darkness, never daring to utter a word while watching the catsup run in some Western killing. I vowed that I would never own a piece of apparatus which seemed so obviously designed to diminish the image of man, enslave his emotions, destroy his incentive, wreck his curiosity, and contribute to total mental and moral atrophy. I didn’t think it would be good for the book business, either.

Ben and Max didn’t sell me on television, but they did make the audition seem a challenge. What could I do? I had never taken a lesson in acting or public speaking in my life. When I spoke extemporaneously, I often rambled. In fact, that was my approach to talking and to teaching. Sticking to the subject never bothered me ... or breaking the rules; I didn’t know any of them. I just talked. All I had was a spontaneity springing from a love of ideas and of people. I laid these cards on the table as carefully as I could, but Cooper’s only response was, “You are a raw talent. I’m sure you can make it.”

Make what? On the morning of the auditions, I arrived at the Civic Theatre (an adjunct to the Chicago Civic Opera House which at that time had been taken over as a television studio—this was while Chicago was still active in the game of creating for the medium) and I was as nervous as a debutante on the threshold of her debut. A hundred men and women were standing in the 143wings, and the fact that I knew some of them and had sold them books made matters worse. All at once, I knew that I was at war with them all. I was competing for a role and I had to be better than the rest.

We were instructed to come out on the stage at a given signal, peer toward a camera marked by two red eyes, and talk, sing, dance, or perform in our fashion for three minutes. By the time my turn came up, I was ready to fall on my face from sheer nervous exhaustion. The red lights blinked on, and I began to talk. I talked for three minutes and was waved off.

I had had enough lecture experience to feel the incompleteness of such an experience. No audience, no response, no nothing, just: your three minutes are up (after all the tension and readiness to go out and perform). I hurried out of the theatre and back to the store, where I paced around like a wild beast. I was certain that I had failed. Everything that I had been building up for seemed cut out from under me, and I could only talk to people or wrap their packages in a mechanical daze.

At five o’clock in the afternoon the spell was broken. Max came in along with a towering young man of massive build who extended a huge hand toward me, crying, “Let me be the very first to congratulate you. You have a television program for the next thirteen weeks!”

At my total astonishment, he threw back his head and emitted a Tarzan laugh. I liked him very much, but I could not place him at all. He was Albert Dekker, an actor who has probably appeared in more Western movies than any other star and who at that time was acting in a 144play in Chicago. He was a friend of Cooper’s and subsequently a friend of mine, frequently accompanying me to the television studio during the remainder of his run in Chicago.

But at that moment I could only sputter and stutter and wheel around as though preparing for a flying leap, and the next few minutes gave way to complete pandemonium, as everyone shared in my sudden good fortune.

The show ran for more than thirteen weeks. It lasted a year. It was sandwiched between a show about nursing and one about cooking. It was a fifteen minute slot, but in the course of this time I had to do three commercials—opening refrigerators and going into the wonders thereof, selling cosmetics, even houses. It was a mess. During the entire year, nobody ever evinced any interest in building the show, and when it was finally cancelled, I was torn between hurt pride and recognition of an obvious godsend. Now and then I had received a small amount of critical acclaim, but on the whole, my first venture into television seemed a disaster, financially as well as spiritually. And I hate failure.

Well, there was no use apologizing. I had had my chance, a whole year of it, and I didn’t make the grade. The poor time slot, the overloading of commercials were no excuse. I could lick my wounds and say, “Nothing lasts forever. Television is television. They squeeze you out and throw you out.” But in my heart I knew that the show had never had an audience because it was not good enough. So it ended in failure, and along with it, my relations with Max Cooper.

145For two years, I was away from television entirely, except for an occasional call from Dan Schuffman of WBKB asking me to pinch hit for someone who was taken ill. Among those for whom I served as proxy was Tom Duggan, a real good guy who developed considerable local fame by getting into one scrap after another and finally, after getting into the biggest scrap of all, practically being deported from Chicago to pursue the same career in Southern California where he continues to be a nightly success.

Although it seemed to me from time to time that glimmerings of creativity could be detected in the television field, I no longer had any serious interest in the medium. When, shortly after Hope and I were married, we gave an autographing party for Walter Schimmer, a local TV and radio producer who had written a book called, What Have You Done for Me Lately?, the TV relationship was incidental to the objective of boosting a Chicago writer. One of the guests at the party was the station chief of WBKB, Sterling (Red) Quinlan. I had previously met him only casually and was surprised to be drawn into a literary conversation with him, during which he told me that he was working on a book, to be called, The Merger. The next day, he sent me the manuscript to read and I found it most interesting, particularly as it dealt with a phase in the development of the broadcasting industry, about which Quinlan, as an American Broadcasting Company vice president, obviously knew a great deal. This was a period during which any number of novels with a background of Big Business were being published. I 146thought Quinlan had done an unusually honest job with it and wrote him a note to this effect when I returned the manuscript.

Several weeks later, I received a phone call from Quinlan which sounded quite different from the tough-minded executive of my superficial acquaintance. “What’s wrong with my book?” he said. “No one wants to publish it.” He really wanted to know where he had gone wrong.

I tried to explain the vagaries of publishing and of publishers’ tastes and how it was a matter of timing and placement with certain publishers who publish certain types of things. But I could see this made little sense to Quinlan, because there is really not much sense in it. Finally I said, “Look, send the book over. You need a front runner. Maybe I can break down a door for you.” I’m sure he didn’t believe me, but he sent the book over anyway.

I sent the manuscript to Ken McCormick, editor-in-chief at Doubleday, after phoning to tell him about it, and as luck would have it, Ken liked the book and made an offer. I’m sure Quinlan thought I was some kind of wizard, and of course I was delighted to have been able to help.

With Red’s book in the process of being published, I turned my mind to other matters—mostly the sheer joy of living. Business was strong, Hope and I were enjoying the best of good times, we were soon to have a child, we were floating on a cloud and wanted no interference from anything. I avoided phone calls and invitations and put 147away all thoughts of becoming anything in the public eye. I just wanted to be a good bookseller, earn a living, spend time with my family, and leave the world alone.

It was in this frame of mind that I received a call one day from Quinlan asking me to join him for lunch at the Tavern Club (a businessmen’s luncheon club located near the WBKB studios). I was interested in Red’s literary ambitions and was glad to accept.

Red Quinlan is more than a typical example of a “pulled up by my own boot straps” success story. He is a fairly tall man with reddish hair, a white, smooth face, and blue eyes that can change from pure murder to the softness that only Irish eyes can take on. He knows every way to survive the jungle and moves with the slightly spread foot and duck walk of a man treading a world built on sand. One part of his mind deals only with business; the other part is dedicated to a sensitive appreciation of the written word and a consuming desire to write a good book. At the beginning he may have wanted to make the best seller list, but his concern is now with truth and craftsmanship and with what it means to be a writer. He is a fascinating man who has done much for me.

Two other men joined us for lunch at the club. One was a heavy-set man of Greek descent named Peter DeMet who controlled large interests in the television world. The other was Matt Veracker, general manager of WBKB. We ate a good lunch and talked in generalities until Quinlan asked me if I had read any good books lately. I had just finished a collection of short stories by 148Albert Camus and was particularly taken by a piece called, “Artist at Work.” As I told the story, DeMet seemed suddenly very interested. But the conversation went no further. We shook hands all around and broke up.

Less than an hour later, Quinlan called me at the shop and asked me to come right over to his office. I could tell as I walked in that something was on the fire. Red came around the desk and sat down with me on the couch. “Stuart,” he said, “we have an open half hour following a new science show that the University of Chicago is sponsoring. How would you like to have it?” This was in 1958 when astro-physics had burst upon the public consciousness. Hence the science show.

“I’ve even thought of the name for your show,” Quinlan continued. “Books and Brent.”

I still remained silent, caught in an enormous conflict. I did want the show ... to prove something to myself. But at the same time I didn’t want to be bothered, I didn’t want to get caught up in the hours of study the job entailed. And I no longer needed the money or a listing in the local TV guides to bolster my ego. Yet I wanted the chance again.

Red noted my hesitation and, although slightly nettled by my lack of enthusiasm, recognized that I was not giving him a come-on. He went to the phone and said, “Ask Dan Schuffman to step in here.”

Danny took over the argument. The price was set, with promise of a raise within twelve weeks. The show would run from September through June, no cancellation clause, 149no commercials sandwiched in to break up the continuity of my presentation. I had complete control over the choice of books and what I would say about them. Everything was settled. Now all I had to do was tell Hope!

It wasn’t easy. Hope knew something was on my mind and refrained from asking about it until the children were in bed. Then I told my story. It would be five days a week at the frightening hour of eight o’clock in the morning. Hope took the whole thing in and accepted the situation. But we both had strong misgivings.

I went to work. Each book had to be read and pondered the night before I reviewed it. Asking myself of each volume what in essence it was really about, what meanings and values it pointed to, was the crux of the matter and a most difficult undertaking. Every morning I delivered my presentation and then ran to the bookstore. I came home at six, had dinner, and started preparing for the next morning. It was impossible to entertain or to see friends, and I was half dead from lack of sleep. Finally, to lessen the strain of five shows a week, Red suggested that Hope appear with me on the Friday shows for a question and answer session, cutting the formal reviews to four a week. Again it took some persuading—Hope would have nothing to do with it unless she “looked” right, “sounded” right, and could offer questions that were sincere and significant. She did all of these things superbly and for the next three years appeared with me every Friday.

Still, it was a grueling task. I wanted to give the very 150best I could each day, and I felt that I was being drained. But what was really killing my drive was the suspicion that I was working in a vacuum. After all, who could be viewing my dissertations on the problems of man and the universe at eight in the morning? I decided it would probably be appreciated all around if I quit like a gentleman. So one morning, after about eight weeks of giving my all to what I judged to be a totally imaginary audience, I interruptedinterrupted whatever I was talking about and said, “You know, I don’t think anyone is watching this program. I’m very tired of peering into two red eyes and talking books just for the sake of talking. I believe I’ll quit.”

What I really meant to say, of course, was, “If anyone is watching, won’t he please drop me a note and say so.” But it didn’t come out that way. I walked out of the studio thinking it was all over.

To my great astonishment, Quinlan soon reached me by phone at the shop, saying, “What are you trying to do? Get me killed? The phone has been ringing here all morning with people demanding to know why I’m firing you! Did you say that on the air?”

I hastened to explain and told him what I did say. The following day hundreds of letters arrived. I suddenly realized that I had an audience.

Hope and I were thrilled and went to work with renewed vigor. The mail continued to grow. At eight a.m. people were viewing and listening and, of all things, writing to me—not only housewives, but also teachers, librarians, doctors, lawyers, occasional ministers. 151Newspaper columnists became interested and reviews were flattering to a point where I was afraid I might begin to take myself seriously.

Another thing was also happening. Although I never mentioned on the air that I had a bookstore, people began to call the store asking for books I had reviewed. Other bookstores found that Books and Brent was stimulating their business, and some of them, particularly in outlying areas, took it upon themselves to write notes to the publishers about what was happening. I began to wonder if what the book business needed generally wasn’t a coast to coast TV bookshow.

Not long after these thoughts had formed in my mind, Pete DeMet asked me to come and see him at the hotel where he was staying. When I arrived, I found his room filled with men ... some kind of important meeting was just breaking up. Finally they dispersed and I was able to sit down with Pete. He told me he wanted to create a TV book of the month show, which he was ready to back to the hilt. He would investigate the possibility of getting the major publishers to pay for some of the time—the rest would be sold to other sponsors. Apparently he and his organization had the genius required to market such a thing. In any event, his gospel was “success” and he evidently saw in me another way to be successful.

I always had mixed reactions to this powerful, heavy-faced man with his white silk shirts and his, to me, mysterious world of promotional enterprise. He had been in the automobile business and subsequently acquired ownership of successful network shows, particularly in the 152sports field, and no one seemed to doubt that he could do anything he set his mind to.

He was always forthright in his relations with me. He boasted that he had never read a book and never intended to, but he saw in my work a vision of something he wanted to be part of. But he also insisted: “If I take you on, I own you.”

Contracts were being drawn up, but Hope and I decided that although the amount of money being offered me—$130,000 for nine months of work—seemed extraordinary, the only thing to do was to turn the offer down.

So I went to see Pete and told him the deal was off. The money was wonderful, but so was my marriage, my personal life. I couldn’t see myself catching a plane to the West Coast on a moment’s notice, only to be told that I was heading for the East Coast the following week. There might be some excitement in such a frenetic pace, but I was getting too old for that sort of thing, and I didn’t need the pace and the noise to persuade me that I was living.

My would-be benefactor looked at me as though I had gone out of my mind, but he let me go without any further badgering.

By this time I had become more than a little intrigued with the Frank Buck approach to capturing live talent. On the next occasion DeMet pressed me to sign the contract, he assured me that I wasn’t nearly as good or important as I thought I was. They were not at all certain, he said, of my “acceptance” in various markets, and 153furthermore there was threat now of replacing me altogether: some people felt that a Clifton Fadiman or a Vincent Price with a “ready-made” or “built-in” audience would be distinctly preferable to someone completely unknown outside of Chicago. It would take a lot of adroit PR work to build up the ratings for an unknown.

I couldn’t contradict him, and happily I did not feel smart-alecky enough to tell him, “Go ahead and get those fellows if you think they can bring a book to life better than I can.” I simply refused to sign without the consent of my wife.

That night I was in the midst of reporting the day’s events to Hope when the phone rang. Hope answered. It was for me: Pete saying, “Can I come over? I must see you now.”

A half hour later Pete was with us, going through the entire proposition and concluding by saying, “You’ll do everything I tell you to do, and you’ll make a fortune. We’ll all make money.”

Hope looked Mr. DeMet squarely in the eyes and said, “Money isn’t the God of this household and at the moment I can’t say I enjoy being here with you.”

In the stunned silence that followed, I was seized with a feeling of terrible embarrassment over our attacking Pete DeMet on a level so totally removed from his frame of reference or the very principles of his existence. A few minutes later, Pete got his hat and left. I was sure the whole thing was finished.

As it happened, it was just the beginning. One of our best friends, in or out of television, was the late Beuhlah 154Zackary, producer of “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” and as fine a spirit as I have ever known. She used to say to me, “If I can only discover exactly what makes you tick, I’ll make you a household name throughout the nation.” Had she lived, I’m convinced she would have done it. In any event, it was Beuhlah at this point who saw merit lurking somewhere beneath the high pressure and convinced Hope and me that we should explore the matter further. Finally we consented to go ahead, provided Jack Pritzker act as our attorney and read every line of every paper (including the dotting of i’s and the crossing of t’s) before it was signed. Things were agreed upon to everyone’s satisfaction, and I was in the Pete DeMet organization.

I had confided in Hardwick Moseley at Houghton Mifflin about the enterprise and he wrote to me (in March of 1959): “I do hope the DeMet deal on Books and Brent goes through and that you get your rightful share of the plunder. You know I always expected something like this. I am delighted that it is happening so soon. When you get time why not let me know a little of the detail. If we can get you on in the high grass and a variety of stations everywhere it will be the best thing that has happened to the book business in years because you do sell books.”

It seemed a long time since Hardwick had lifted me from the depths by writing me that I had to remain a bookseller, no matter what.

But everything fell through from the very beginning. The money Pete hoped to raise from the publishing industry 155failed to materialize at all. Television does not sell books, the publishers chorused. From my end, I was assailed by doubts because I was never invited to present the proposition to the publishers with whom I was most intimately acquainted. From Pete’s end, there was anger and frustration when the industry would not buy something which he was convinced might prove their economic salvation. He decided to look for other markets.

Production was scheduled to start in September. But by this time other things had taken precedence over Books and Brent. Pete entered into a real estate promotion to develop a kind of Disney wonderland in New York called Freedom Land. His lawyer, Milt Raynor, wrote to me in flattering terms about myself and the book project, but indicated that for the time being the undertaking would have to be shelved.

It was a letdown. But the irony of the thing was that a promotional genius like Pete could be so fascinated by the publishing field and what might be done for it, and then so totally discouraged by the supineness, invincible ignorance, and general reluctance of an enormous, potentially very profitable industry to take even modest advantage of the only advertising medium that might bring it before the public. Pete found only one publisher actively encouraging. The rest were negative.

This was the idea they were offered: I was to review, on a network show, books selected by myself from the lists of all publishers. In our experience in Chicago, although I rarely, if ever, suggested that anyone rush down to his neighborhood bookstore (if any) and buy 156the book in question, every bookstore in the area felt the impact of my lectures. The instances in which my own store sold hundreds of books in a week because of a review I had given were fantastic—and more frequently than not the very large downtown stores considerably outsold my own shop on the same volume, for I was not engaged in self-advertising. This is something unique in our day, but not in publishing experience, for Alexander Woollcott used to have the same effect through his radio broadcasts. He was, of course, a national figure ... but not in a popular sense until he went on the radio. Publishers were aware of all this, but they were not convinced.

Pete was convinced. He believed in me because he saw the results of the job I was doing in a very difficult city and saw no obstacle to doing at least as much in other cities. He was an entrepreneur, but perfectly willing to try the idea of wedding television to culture. Actually, I was never a party to any of the planning, any of the strategy, any of the meetings held with publishers or their representatives. To this day, I know nothing of what actually went on. I was just the talent, and all I knew was that there was a clause in the contract that required Pete to put the show on the road no later than September 30, 1959, or else I was free to return to my local television commitments. The option was not picked up, and that was that.

As I mulled the whole thing over at Bark Point, a comment of my father’s kept running through my mind: “When is a man a man? Only when he can stand up to his bad luck.”

157Of course, there was no saying whether the luck was really bad—only that what I envisioned for the future was certainly being held in abeyance. I came back for another year of Chicago television, much like the year before, except for the feeling that I was bringing more experience to it.

It was the letters that kept me persuaded I was right. In spite of the hour, with wives kissing husbands off to work and mothers frantically preparing breakfast and dressing children for school, people were listening and, in increasing number, writing. Greater numbers of people were searching for answers to forgotten questions, or driven, perhaps, back to fundamental questions and to restating them. Hope and I found all this mail a tremendous stimulus. We returned to our city routine. Every evening I came home from the bookstore, had dinner, played or talked with the children, then sat down to read, while Hope read or knitted or mended or listened to music. At midnight we took a short walk to the corner drugstore with Mr. Toast, our Golden Retriever, and had a cup of hot chocolate. These moments were the best of the whole day.

Getting to the studio in the morning was never easy, and on Fridays when we made the mad rush together it was more than usually frantic. Hope is not easy to awaken and would be engaged, more often than not, as we raced across the street like maniacs toward our parked car, in the final acts of dressing, zipping up her skirt, straightening her hair, trying to find her lipstick. Sometimes we barely made it ahead of the cancellation period—five minutes before showtime, but we always 158managed. Then when the ordeal was over, it was perfectly delicious to go out for coffee, swearing solemnly, absolutely, never again would we oversleep ... until the next time.

But why were we doing it? The financial rewards for an unsponsored, sustaining program simply bore no relation whatever to the effort involved. Finally Quinlan called me in and suggested that since the networks didn’t seem interested, it might be a good idea to form an organization and see if I couldn’t sell the show myself.

Hy Abrams, my lawyer and tennis partner, and his brother-in-law, David Linn, often used to ask why I didn’t do anything about promoting the show, to which my answer normally was: “Do what?” But now, with Red’s insistence, I had a feeling that perhaps the time was ripe. Perhaps in the present era of political, economic, and spiritual confusion, people might be becoming worried, harassed, clipped, chipped, agonized enough for a return to reading. They might be susceptible.

David was all for it, and we called a meeting, bringing together, as I recall, Ira Blitzsten, Sidney Morris, Adolph Werthheimer, and my brother-in-law, Milton Gilbert. I made the presentation, outlining not only the prospect but also the likelihood of absolute failure. Together we created the Stuart Brent Enterprises and hired a man to run the show. Again the idea was to sell the thing to the publishing industry. The project hardly got off the ground, yet our case seemed an extremely sound one.

To begin with, we surveyed a thousand letters that had been written to the Books and Brent show. A summary of the survey showed:

159Of the 1000 letters read, 705 or 70.5% had bought one or more books due to Stuart’s review. Some writers had bought as many as ten books. Many listed the books bought and several enclosed sales slips.

Of the 1000 letters read, 107 or 10.7% planned to buy in the near future. Many of these pointed out the difficulties of buying books in the suburbs, where there are few bookstores.

Of the 1000 letters read, 188 or 18.8% wrote “keep up the good work” type of letters. There were requests for book lists, particularly from librarians. A number suggested starting a book club.

Libraries, bookstores, and publishers were represented. The letters showed a good cross section of the community, both economically and age-wise.

David Lande, of Brason Associates, a distributing agency for publishers, helped the cause by writing to Mac Albert, of Simon and Schuster, a letter that said: “While this may not be news to you, I thought you might be interested in knowing that the Stuart Brent book review program has caught on like ‘wildfire’ in this area. Our personal experience has been that Stuart Brent has made more best sellers than Jack Paar. If this is good information for you, use it—if not, we’re still good friends.”

I went to New York and had an opportunity to talk with Mr. Simon, of Simon and Schuster, along with other editors, publishers, and booksellers. Mr. Simon said, “I like you because you are not interested in the I.Q. of man, but in his C.Q.”

“What, sir,” I said, “is the C.Q.?”

“His cultural quotient,” he replied. Then he said: “The book business is exploding. We have a lot of new 160schools, a lot of new libraries. So long as we believe that a child must attend school until eighteen years of age, we will need a great many textbooks. People are hungry for a lot of new things. Books are one way of appeasing that new hunger. No matter where you go or how small the community, you will usually find a new library building and new schools. The book business has a new, great future. We need more good writers to fill the need for books these days. That’s our problem, finding new writers, good writers.”

Most of the major New York publishers and some of the smaller ones bought time on Books and Brent to help initiate its showing on WOR-TV. The pre-taped half-hour shows made their debut simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles on September 12, 1960. In the October 26 issue of Variety, the showbusiness weekly, Thyra Samter Winslow said: “The best of the new live shows is certainly Stuart Brent, who reviews books, and books only, daily Monday through Friday, on WOR-TV.... His style is easy, intimate, calm, interesting. Who knows? He may give just the fillip needed to cause a renaissance of reading by the home girls. And about time, too!”

In Chicago, Paul Molloy, the Sun-Times columnist, who had followed this apparent breakthrough with great enthusiasm, commented on the record of 2,700 letters received during the first four weeks of the broadcasts. “More interesting,” he said, “than the plaudits, however, is the fact that Brent went out on his own and sold the show because he’s convinced there’s a market for it. Most broadcasters aren’t, but they’ll have to come around to 161it. For 2,700 letters in four weeks is a lot of reaction. Even The Untouchables doesn’t touch this record. For my part, I find Brent the most scholarly and at the same time most down to earth teletalker in Chicago today. I’ve yet to leave one of his shows without having learned—or at least thought—something.”

But in spite of all the good sendoffs, TV syndication of Books and Brent failed to pick up the additional sponsorship necessary to make it a going concern. Hal Phillips, program director of KHJ-TV in Los Angeles, wrote: “After much discussion and consideration, we have determined that we will not be continuing with the ‘Books and Brent’ series after Friday, December 2, 1960. This in no way reflects upon our feeling of the top quality and standard of the program. The decision is based upon the lack of sales potential, etc. We have liked this series and have had fine viewer response from it and regret that we will have to discontinue these programs.”

This time, when my venture crumbled, I did not feel affected too deeply. I continued with my daily broadcasts from WBKB, fully prepared to accept their demise also. By this time I had a realistic sense of the pressures to which this industry is subject, and I knew this was a world in which I could not afford to get involved. At the end of my third successive year, the rumors began to circulate. Then Danny Schuffman dropped a hint at lunch one day. Danny has been carefully schooled in the diplomacy of the television jungle and unless you were listening with a third ear you would probably never catch the veiled meaning of the innocent remark.

162After all, while nobody questioned the public service value of the show, the fact remained that the “rating” was at a standstill and there was apparently no possibility of getting a sponsor. At the same time that an estimated 20,000 were viewing me, 46,000 were supposed to be watching something on another channel, 61,000 on another, and 70,000 on still another. The competition must be met. The parent company in New York wants higher ratings. The stockholders want higher profits. Five days a week is too much exposure anyway. Books and Brent has had it. In a world about equally divided between those who are scared to death and those too bored to do anything anyway, the soundness of these operational judgments can scarcely be questioned.

When, finally, Red Quinlan got around to telling me all about this, I knew what was coming and offered no objections. It would have been inconceivable for us to part except as friends. And my mild, husbandly trepidation about breaking the news to Hope proved utterly groundless. She was simply delighted.

During the last weeks of my daily broadcasts, I planned every show with the greatest care and instead of reviewing new and popular fiction and non-fiction, I chose the most profound works that I felt capable of dealing with. In succession, I talked on Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s The Trial, Camus’ The Stranger, Galsworthy’s short story, Quality, Northrop’s Philosophical Anthropology, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Hamlet, Job, Faust, and Peer Gynt, Fromm’s The Art of Loving, 163Erickson’s Childhood and Society, Huxley’s Brave New World, Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment; Four Modern American Writers, and Stendahl’s The Red and the Black. It was a pretty wild course in Western literature and the results were astounding, not only in viewer response, but also in the run on these books experienced by bookstores throughout the city and the suburbs.

Demand was particularly sensational for Father du Chardin’s The Phenomena of Man, also included in this series. A check of bookstores in the area showed sales or orders of approximately 900 copies in a single day. Over 2300 copies of this one title were sold in less than one month. Our shop sold almost 600 copies. A. C. McClurg’s reported: “We had 375 copies of Phenomena of Man on hand before Brent’s review. By 3:30 that afternoon we sold them all and wired Harper and Brothers for 500 more.” McClurg’s had moved only 150 copies of the book during the previous five months.

When I reviewed The Red and the Black, we had only ten copies in stock at the shop (in the Modern Library edition) and sold them out immediately. We tried picking up more from McClurg’s, but they too were sold out. I then called one of the large department store book sections to see how they were doing. The clerk who answered the phone said, “No, we don’t have a copy in stock. We’re all sold out.”

“Was there a run on the book?” I said.

“Yes, as a matter of fact there was.”

“Can you tell me the reason?”

“Yes, you see they’ve just made a movie out of the book.”

164He almost had me persuaded until I checked the theatres. There was no such movie—not playing Chicago, anyway.

Since I continually counseled men and women to accept life, to live it, to change themselves if necessary, but never to turn against creation or to abandon love and hope, never to fall for the machine or the corporation or to look for Father in their stocks and bonds, I was hardly in a position—even armed with the facts and figures—to try to fight the organization for the saving of Books and Brent. I did, however, two weeks before the series ended, take the audience into my confidence and explain the situation as fairly as I could. Mr. Quinlan had my talk monitored and agreed that I handled the matter with sincerity and truthfulness. There was nothing Red could do—he was tied to an organization that was too impersonal to respond to the concerns of a mere 20,000 people. We understood each other perfectly on this score.

But what happened after my announcement was something neither of us ever expected, even though we knew there were some people out there who bought books and wrote heartwarming letters. Phone calls began coming into the studio by the hundreds, letters by the thousands. One late afternoon, Red called me and said, “I knew you were good, but not that good. I just got a call from the asylum at Manteno protesting your cancellation. Even the madmen like you.” We both laughed but we were touched, too.

Letters, telegrams, and even long distance phone calls began to plague the chairman of the board in New York 165City. Letters by the score were sent to Mr. Minow in Washington. But the most beautiful letters were those directed to Hope and me, on every kind of paper, written in every kind of hand, some even in foreign languages. Until this has happened to you, it is impossible to imagine the feeling. The meaning of a mass medium strikes you and all at once it seems worthwhile to cope with the whole shabby machinery if you are able to serve through it.

Hope and I sat reading every bit of mail late into the night. She said: “Do you remember telling me what F. Scott Fitzgerald said?” I looked puzzled. “He said that America is a willingness of the heart,” she prompted.

I have indicated that Red Quinlan is a man who knows his business and his way around in it, and that he is also a man deeply enamored of the world of letters. He was even less ready than I to call it quits. He invited me to lunch one day, and after pointing out that, anyway, for the sake of my health the five-day-a-week grind was too much of a strain to be continued, he asked, “But how about once a week at a good hour with a sponsor?”

I hesitated. The columnists had broken the story of my demise at WBKB. Another station had shown interest and we had had preliminary talks. But the fact was, I couldn’t have asked for better treatment than WBKB had given me. Nobody ever told me what to do or how to slant my program. The crew on the set could not have been more helpful. I felt at home there. And while Hope had at first been concerned about the possibility of our lives being wrecked by the awful demands television exacted, she was now beginning to worry about the people 166who wrote in, telling about the needs that my show somehow ministered to. When Red sold the show on a weekly basis to Magikist, a leading rug cleaning establishment, there was really no doubt about my decision. When I met Mr. Gage, the president of the corporation, he said, “If my ten year old daughter likes you and my wife likes you, that’s enough for me. I’m sure everybody will like you. And we’ll try very hard to help you, too.” If you can just get that kind of sponsor, things become a good deal easier. But somehow, I do not think the woods are full of them.

Quinlan’s interest in conveying through television some of the excitement of the world of books and ideas also resulted in an interesting experimental program called “Sounding Board,” in which I was invited to moderate a panel of literary Chicagoans in a monthly two-hour late-evening discussion on arts and letters. Our regular panel consisted of Augie Spectorsky, editor of Playboy Magazine; Van Allen Bradley, literary editor of the Daily News; Fannie Butcher, literary editor of the Chicago Tribune; Hoke Norris, literary editor of the Chicago Sun-Times; Paul Carroll, then editor of the experimental literary magazine, Big Table; Hugh Duncan, author, and Dr. Daniel Boorstin, professor of American history at the University of Chicago. They were fine discussions and we kept them up for six months, but nobody would pick up the tab.

My approach to television performance, being untutored, is probably quite unorthodox. I do not work from notes. In preparation, I first read the book, then think 167about it, seeking connective links and related meanings. In the actual review of the book, I quite often stray into asides that assume greater importance than the review itself.

I never say to myself: this is the theme, this is the middle, this the end. I say: get into the heart of the book and let your mind distill it, and, as often happens, enlightening relationships with other books and ideas may develop.

I cannot perform in a state of lassitude. Before the cameras, I always find myself tightening up until the floor manager signals that I’m ON. For a moment, I am all tenseness, realizing that people are watching me, but in a few minutes I have forgotten this and am thinking about nothing but the book and the ideas I am talking about. Now I am carried by the mood and direction of thought. If I want to stand, I stand; if I want to sit, I sit; if I want to grimace, I grimace. Nothing is rehearsed or calculated in advance. All I can do is unfold a train of thought springing from the study that has preceded performance, and the toll is heavy. Sometimes after the show, I can barely straighten up, or I may be utterly dejected over my inability to say all I should have said. Then I leave the studio, moody and silent.

I never talk to anyone before a show except my director. He understands me and knows how easily I’m thrown. It can be a slight movement from the boom man or a variation in the countdown signal from the floor manager, something unexpected in the action of a camera man or a slight noise somewhere in the studio, and I react as though someone threw a glass of water in my face. Then I am off the track, floundering like a ship without a rudder. 168Sometimes I can right myself before the show is ended, sometimes not. Hence the frequent depression, for I feel that every show must be the best show possible, that “off” days are not permitted, and that I can never indulge myself in the attitude of, “Oh well, better one next time.” When people are watching and listening, you must perform, and perform your best.

Often my grammar goes haywire. I know better, but I can become helpless against the monster known as time. I have to fight time. I cannot hesitate or make erasures. So I plunge on, hoping that some one significant thought may emerge clearly—some thought perhaps as vital as that which animates the pages of The Phenomena of Man, calling on us to recognize the eternal core of faith and courage: Courage to rebel and faith in the realization of our own being. Courage that takes the self seriously; faith that is grounded in activity.

I hesitate to make any predictions about the future of television, as a means of communication or as a business. As a business, it must be run for profit. The argument is not about this point, but about the level of operation from which such profit shall be sought. From personal experience, I can say that TV does not have to constitute a blow to life itself. Perhaps many of us are “mindless in motion” and now sit “mindlessly motionless” in front of our TV sets. But I take heart in the certain knowledge that many men and women are not so much concerned with the camera eye as they are in finding a way back to the inward eye.

169

12 Life in the Theatre

There are even odder ways of life than sitting alone behind a desk in a little room lined with books waiting for someone to come in and talk with you, or delivering sermons on literature to the beady red eyes of a television camera. One of them is the theatre.

You may recall the scene in Kafka’s The Trial in which K meets the Court Painter and goes to this innocuous madman’s room, ostensibly to learn more about the Judge who is to sit at the trial. The room is so tiny, K has to stand on the bed while the Painter pulls picture after picture from beneath this lone article of furniture, blows the dust off them into K’s face, and sells several to him. Although the reader recognizes from the beginning that it is all a tissue of lies and deception, K leaves feeling satisfied that at last he has someone on his side who will put in a “right” word for him. It is evident to what ends K will now go to bribe, cheat, blackmail, be made a total fool of, in the hope of getting someone to intervene in his fate. 170In addition to its comment upon a culture that would rather surrender identity than face up to its guilt, the scene is terribly funny, as well as terribly humiliating.

It is this scene that always comes to mind when I think of the nightmare of nonsense I lived through in the course of three weeks in the theatre. It happened one summer a few years ago when Hope and I had come down from Bark Point to check on the shop. I was answering a pile of letters when the phone rang. It was a man I had met sometime before who turned out to be business manager of a summer stock theatre operating in a suburb northwest of Chicago. He wondered if I would like to play a lead opposite Linda Darnell in the Kaufmann and Hart comedy, The Royal Family. The role was that of the theatrical agent, Oscar Wolfe, who theoretically functioned as a sane balance to a family of zany, childish, totally mischievous grown-ups (roughly modeled on the Barrymore clan).

Hope, who had grown up in Westchester society, admitted that when she was a girl attending summer theatre it had always been her secret wish to be a part of it. She thought it might be good fun, even though I had never acted in my life. So the business manager came over and I signed the contract, calling for a week of rehearsal and two weeks of performance.

Summer theatre around Chicago cannot be classified as an amateur undertaking, although part of its economics is based on utilizing large numbers of young people who want the “training” and generally avoiding the high costs involved in regular theatrical production. But top stars and personalities are booked, the shows are promoted to 171the public as professional offerings and are reviewed as such by the theatrical critics, and the whole enterprise is regarded as essential to the vitality of a “living theatre.” The outfit I signed up with was an established enterprise and, as a matter of fact, is still going. I was not entirely confident that I could deliver, but I had no doubt that I was associating myself with people who could.

The theatre itself was not a refashioned barn or circus tent set-up, but an actual theatre building, restored from previous incarnations as a movie and vaudeville house. I arrived on a lovely August morning but inside the theatre was in total darkness except for some lights on the stage. I made my way timidly down front where a number of people were sitting. Several nodded to me, and I nodded back. Presently a tall man got up on the stage and announced that he was going to direct the play. He said, however, that Miss Darnell had not yet arrived and, also, that there were not enough scripts to go around. We would begin with those who had their parts.

For the next three days, I sat in the darkness from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. No one asked me to read, no one asked me to rehearse, practically no one talked to me at all. I managed a few words with Miss Darnell, who was gracious and charming, but I was beginning to wonder when I would be asked to act. Hope had been working with me on my lines, but it is one thing to know lines sitting down and quite another to remember them while trying to act and give them meaning before an audience.

I began to suspect that something was haywire. A friend who taught drama at a nearby college and often 172took character roles in stock confirmed my fears by assuring me that this play would never get off the ground. “It will never open,” he said.

We were to open on a Monday. It was already Friday and I had been on stage exactly once and nobody yet knew his part—I least of all. In addition to my fears, I was beginning to feel slighted. I wondered what I was doing in this dark, dank place, and what the rest thought they were doing, including the innumerable young men and women between sixteen and twenty years of age who were ostensibly developing their knowledge of the theatre through odd jobs such as wardrobe manager, program manager, etc. There didn’t seem much to manage and I wasn’t sure it was really a very healthy environment. By this time, a fair number of the cast had taken to screaming, which is something I am not used to among grown-ups for any extended period. I also had my doubts about a young man who spent most of his offstage moments sweet-talking a bulldog. I wondered if acting necessarily precluded any kind of emotional responsibility.

Saturday night the play preceding us closed. We rehearsed all that night. Sunday the theatre would be dark, and Monday The Royal Family was to go on. The Saturday night rehearsal was initially delayed because one of the principals could not be found. Finally he was located, dead drunk, in a local tavern. It was now almost one a.m. and not even a walk-through with script in hand had yet been attempted. Instead the company was engaged in a welter of screeching, shouting, confusion, and recriminations. This was sheer, silly nonsense I decided, and went 173to see the business manager. I told him I’d be pleased to quit and offered to pay double my salary to any experienced actor he could get to replace me. I was at once threatened with a lawsuit.

At two in the morning, everyone was called on stage by the director, who made a little speech saying that he was just no longer able to direct the play, he couldn’t pull it together! At this, Miss Darnell walked off the stage, saying, “This play will not open on Monday or Tuesday or ever, unless something is done immediately.” After all, she had a reputation to uphold.

Thereupon, the director returned with a further announcement. It so happened, he said, that a brilliantly gifted young New York director was “visiting here between important plays” and he had consented to pull the play together for us! Our gift of Providence then stepped forward and we began to rehearse.

When my cue came and I offered my lines, the new director said: “The Oscar Wolfe part is really just an afterthought. The show will play just as well without the Wolfe character appearing at all.”

“Fine,” I said, but pandemonium had already broken loose as the former director and some of the actors took issue with this new twist. We were already missing one actor and now this new director wanted to sack me. Well, I had asked for it, but Miss Darnell and the others persuaded me to stick with it. The rehearsal continued.

At five a.m. a halt was called and the treasurer of the theatre asked to say a few words. Under Equity rules, he reminded us, we were entitled to overtime for extra 174rehearsal. He asked us to waive this for the sake of the play. I waited silently to see what the general reaction would be. It didn’t take long to find out: Nothing doing, play or no play! I went along with them on that. What I couldn’t understand was why they put up with all they did: the filthy little cubicles that served as dressing rooms, the rats and cockroaches that scudded across the floor, the lack of any backstage source of drinking water—the whole atmosphere seemed deliberately designed to make an actor’s life completely insupportable. And now the management was sulking because the actors didn’t have enough “love for the theatre” to forgo their pay for overtime.

At six a.m. it was decided that rehearsal would resume at one o’clock in the afternoon. As we were about to leave, too tired to care any longer about anything, the director came up and said he was sure I must have misunderstood him. He would indeed be sorry if I left the show or if he had hurt my feelings. What he had really meant to say wassay was that the Oscar Wolfe part lends credence to the movement and meaning of the play. I was glad to leave it at that.

The following afternoon, before evening rehearsals, Hope and I stopped at a drugstore a few steps from the theatre. There we found Miss Darnell sitting in a booth sipping a coke. She motioned us over.

“The play won’t open Monday,” she said. “I’ve made my decision.”

We agreed wholeheartedly.

“But have you heard the latest?”

“No,” we said.

“The play that follows us in is falling apart, too. An 175old-timeold-time actor in it, pretty well known for his paranoia, slugged a young actress for a remark she made and someone else jumped in and put him in the hospital.”

“What’s next with our show?” I said. “Has a replacement been found for our drunken friend?”

“Yes. He’s busy now rehearsing his lines.”

“This is a world such as I’ve never been in,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Neither have I. Not like this one,” said Linda Darnell.

On stage, we again worked all night. It was a mess. The director was in a rage. He scowled, threatened, exhorted. Everybody was going to pieces. No one talked to anyone.

On Monday morning, we started at ten, planning to rehearse up to curtain time. But at five in the afternoon, Miss Darnell told the management she would not appear, and under her contract they could do nothing but accept her decision. We went back to work that night and rehearsed until five in the morning.

Came Tuesday afternoon and we were back again in our black hole of Calcutta. By now we were all more than a little hysterical and the language would have been coarse for a smoker party. Some of the players were so exhausted they slept standing up. But now the play was finally getting under way. Zero hour was approaching. The curtain went up and the show began.

Opening night was incredible. In scene after scene, lines were dropped, cues forgotten, and ad libs interjected to a point that it was almost impossible to stay in character. The actress who claimed she had played her part as 176an ancient dowager for the last twenty years (“Everywhere—I even played it in Australia”) forgot her lines and was utterly beside herself. She said never had she been subjected to such humiliation. One actor tripped over her long morning coat and fell on his face. A bit of a nut anyway, he got up gracefully, muttered some inanities, and tickled the old dowager under the chin. She reared back, nostrils flaring. All this time, I was sitting at a piano observing the scene, feeling like a somnambulist.

But the play went on, and although it certainly improved during its run, the relations of the cast did not. Every evening we came in, put on our make-up, and dressed for our parts without saying a word. One night I lost a shirt. Another night an actress had her purse stolen. On another occasion a fist fight broke out between an actor and an actress. Backstage life went on either in utter silence or in bursts of yelling, screaming, and hair-pulling. The atmosphere was thick with hostility. But on stage it was as though nothing outside the world of the play had ever happened, unless you were close enough to hear names still being called under the breath. It was crazy.

Many of us in the cast were asked to appear on television interviews to promote the show. A good friend of mine, Marty Faye, who has had one of the longest continuous runs on Chicago TV, asked me to appear on his late evening broadcast. Since the gossip columnists in the city were already having a field day over the strife at this well-known summer playhouse, I told Marty (and his viewing audience) my reaction to the affair and to what I had seen of the theatre in general. I had no idea I was 177exploding such a bombshell. From right and left, I was attacked by everyone (including the lady who had had such a horrible experience playing the dowager) as a traitor to the theatre and its great traditions. By everyone, that is, except Miss Darnell and her leading man, who agreed that something might be done for actors if the public knew of the conditions under which they so often work and of the wretched, tragic life they so frequently have to lead. What a terrible waste this amounts to! No wonder you have to be virtually insane to pursue a career in the theatre!

Herb Lyons, the Tribune columnist, couldn’t stop laughing over lunch the day I told him my experiences. Irv Kupcinet, the Sun-Times columnist, however, whose talented daughter was among our struggling players, failed to see any humor in the situation. But the real payoff came when checks were distributed after the first week of our engagement. For the week of rehearsals, I had received the munificent sum of thirty-five dollars, but my salary for actual performance was to be two hundred and fifty dollars per week. My check for the first week’s work was $18.53! What happened to the rest of the money? Well, in the first place, I had to join the union and pay six months dues. Then I had to pay the full price for any seats I reserved for friends or relatives and even for a seat for Hope. Then I paid for the daily pressing of my suit and the laundering of my shirts and even a hidden fee for the use of the dressing room. Finally, there was the usual social security and withholding tax deduction.

But the whole Kafka nightmare was well worth it. In 178spite of acquiring at least one enemy for life and no monetary profit at all, I gained some friends who take the theatre seriously and in a treacherous business, are determinedly making headway. In addition, Linda Darnell, a person of great sweetness, has become a cherished acquaintance. It is not often one comes out of a nightmare so well.

179

13 Writing and Publishing

I knew she was crazy the moment she entered the room. It was a miserable November day, snowing and blowing, when a woman with a round face, rosy from the bitter cold, wearing a long raincoat and a hat trimmed with big bright cherries burst into the old Seven Stairs and almost ran me into the fireplace.